Life in France seen through the round window of a straw-built grand design.

Willkommen Bienvenue Welcome

Welcome, gentle readers.

This is an everyday tale of regular folk, who moved from Sheffield to the deepest Corrèze in France Profonde and thence to the rather more cosmopolitan Lot in search of something… different. We certainly found it.

The Lot is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Reputedly, a famous TV globetrotter was asked where, of all the places in the world he had visited, he might return to. He answered, ‘The Lot’.

Fans of Channel 4’s Grand Designs will know that we built a somewhat quirky straw bale house-with-a-view here in the Lot, not far from the celebrated Dordogne river. You can read all about it in my book, Bloody Murder On The Dog's Meadow, or watch the re-runs of the programme on More 4, or view it on You Tube.

After a break in the proceedings to write a book or two, this blog now takes the form of an everyday journal. Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don't (but the art school dance goes on forever). I hope it will give you an entertaining insight into what it's like to live in a foreign country; what it's like in the slow lane as an ex-pat Brit in deepest France.

I shall undertake to update this once or twice a week, unless absent on leave. Comments always welcomed, by the way, but I do tend to forget what buttons to click in order to answer them.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Turning Point

In many ways, it was just a day like any other day. It
was only later that I came to realise its significance.

While the FBI was out hunting for the second suspect
nail-bomber in Boston, I was driving home from Brive with our dog and our shopping
and my trusty Honda strimmer in the back of a car that smelled of unleaded
petrol. For some strange reason, our daughter has always loved the smell. It
always makes me think of the raging headache that maddens Jason Compson, the
anti-hero of William Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury.

The rain that fell briefly in the morning and threatened
to abort my assault on the undergrowth hadn’t materialised. In the context of
this year’s deluge, it was a pretty nice day. En route for my wife’s clinic, I
dropped into the pool emporium on the western edge of town to enquire about a
swimming pool for a new client. Despite the marked-down prices on recliners,
Fat Boy cushions and other accessories, I was the only customer in the swanky
showroom. Left alone to browse, the place positively resounded with the babble
of water being circulated around some kind of have-your-own spa.

A charming young assistant took down details of the
desired pool. Half way through, she asked me if I was English. So, she
revealed, was she. I would never have guessed. Her name was Molly and she’d
been educated over here since the age of 10: a reminder of just what an
advantage it is to be bilingual. If The Daughter doesn’t make it in the world
of fashion and design, at the very least she could train to be a personable
intermediary for a company that sells pools to well heeled English-speaking
settlers.

Young Molly gave me her telephone number and I headed off
to the clinic for a spot of strimming during the lunch break, so as not to
disturb the prevalent atmosphere of therapeutic calm. My strimmer’s been with
me for 16 years or so. It was the first bit of heavy-duty equipment that I
bought for a new rural life. Every spring, I bring it out of hiding like the
geraniums to acclimatise. Then, a few hours later, I fire it up timorously –
just in case that this is the year in which it fails to respond. Not this year.
It sparked into life on the second pull: a testament to the Honda motor and my
ability to follow the instructions for winter storage. And I shouted from
the highest hill:my strimmer has survived another winter!

Just like mine - only cleaner

Much as I love my strimmer, though, I really don’t like
the act of strimming. It’s neck-and-shoulder-breaking work fraught with the
anxiety that I’m going to cut through something I shouldn’t. In Brive, there’s
a side passage that leads from the street to the back garden. Neighbourhood
dogs tend to use it for their ‘business’, so there’s also the potential hazard
of flying faecal matter to contend with. This year, too, a terrible new weed
has spread like a plague. It’s the by-product, Debs reckons, of too many
Monsanto products in neighbouring gardens.

Having finished my work in rapid time, I shared a rapid
lunch with my wife and awaited the visit of the man from SAUR – the catalyst
for my visit. He was coming to change the water meter. Unable to wander out of
earshot of the front-door cuckoo! I took the seat off the loo for the
umpteenth time and put it back again in such a way that it would stay vertical
if necessary without threatening the equipment of male clients.

Another job jobbed. All in the day’s work of a jobbing
writer. While outside wrestling with the new John Wyndham weeds in the bed
nearest the back door, the man from the SAUR turned up: a big genial man with a
lavish tattoo on his forearm. I imagined some kind of five-hour operation that
would involve cutting off the water and posting notices to clients about using
the loo. It took about five minutes. So I made the man a coffee and we had a
brief chat about the lamentable events of the Boston marathon. What is the
world coming to?

With time now suddenly on my hands, I could afford a
quick walk into town before taking our bored dog home for his supper. A brief
visit to the central library, because my subconscious voice had talked me into
believing that I needed a little more John Coltrane in my life. Then, after my
fix, I nipped into a pharmacy reputed to be the cheapest in town. I wanted to
buy some pro-biotics for a bothersome gut. The place was heaving; all of life
had taken a ticket for the queue. Fortunately, being about the only one there
in the name of preventative medicine, I was in and out in a jiffy. Everyone
else had a prescription to present. I complain bitterly about the level of
taxation in France, but all those insidious ‘social charges’ probably still
don’t pay for all the overpriced medication that this nation of hypochondriacs
consumes.

Why am I telling you all this? Probably just to underline
what an insignificant, uneventful day-in-the-life it was. Until, that is, the
revelation on the journey home. There’s a scenic stretch of road near home,
where you climb up from one fairly nondescript hamlet to the next. There’s a
steep wooded drop on the driver’s side (down which a tractor plunged recently)
and a steep wooded upslope on the passenger’s. The overhanging trees form a
natural tunnel. Normally on this stretch I look out for cars coming down the
hill and for Billy The Kid, an adorable inquisitive black-and-white goat still
enjoying its liberty within the woods. When you stop to talk to Billy The Kid,
he or she tilts his or her head endearingly to one side and ventures down to
the car in the hope that you, like everyone else, has brought some food.

Not quite as cute as Billy The Kid

There was no sign of our friendly neighbourhood goat, but
then it struck me… I could no longer see through the wood to the view on my
left. Yes! This was the day in the year when you suddenly notice
that the trees are no longer bare. Twigs and branches are covered with an
unfurling riot of succulent, waxy, new spring-green leaves. It’s not something,
of course, that happens overnight. It’s not something you necessarily even spot
in the big city, but here in the country the annual miracle of renewal hits you
in the face. Once remarked, it shifts your whole perception for the next seven
months or so. It’s what they call in sporting parlance a ‘game changer’. The
turning point.

Those bloomin' irises

Sure enough, as soon as I got home, I realised that I
could also no longer see through our copse to the road. Those few emerging
irises had imperceptibly become a blue velvet ‘florabundance’. Everything was
pointing to one incontrovertible fact: Summer’s on its way! (That’s all
I really wanted to say.)

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Camp Street

About Me

Born in London, raised in Belfast, further-educated at Exeter and Sussex universities, I'm a professional dilettante, a family man and tireless dog-walker. You can listen to Lost & Found, my monthly radio show on www.expatsradio.com and check out my author page on Amazon.